PSA: LJ

Like many of you, I am not entirely happy about LJ's new ToS, though I'm not sure they're objectively any worse than the ToS of, say, Facebook. I mean, yes, there's the "subject to Russian law" thing, but I am not in Russia, and I suspect that I have at least as much to worry about with my online content being subject to US law under the current regime, because my country is a lot more likely to co-operate with the US government. Realistically, I suspect the biggest worry is that LJ will delete stuff without warning, so, while I'm not going to delete my account and haven't completely made up my mind to stop crossposting, I am going to disable comments on posts from now on, so there won't be any LJ-only content that I might lose. If you're reading on LJ, you should be able to log in and comment on the DW versions of posts using your LJ account as an OpenID, or you can sign up for a DW account and use that to comment. (If you have a DW account and I haven't given you access there please comment on the DW version of this post and let me know who you are on LJ if it's not obvious.)

You can also find me on Facebook under my passport name, sporadically on Instagram as @sadie_whitehart and increasingly infrequently on Twitter as @white_hart.

Reading: The Merchant's Mark

The Merchant's Mark is the third of Pat McIntosh's Gil Cunningham mysteries, set in late fifteenth-century Glasgow. In this one, a barrel that was supposed to contain books turns out, instead, to contain a severed head in brine, and Gil, aided by his fiancée Alys, her father Pierre Mason and his sister Kate, sets out to find out who the dead man was and what happened to him.

I like these books; I first started reading them because I know the author a little (she's one of the Glasgow knitting crowd), but they're enjoyable light reading with occasional scenes of mild peril, and sympathetic characters who I'm enjoying seeing grow and change over the course of the series. There are also nods to both Sayers and Dunnett; the female characters, who are tough and independent without stretching my credulity of what would be possible for women in medieval times, reminded me particularly of the women in Dunnett. In this book I particularly liked Gil's sister Kate, who I hope will also reappear in later books, and the developing friendship between her and Alys.